The Daily Princetonian
Thursday October 9, 2014
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SKIN & INK
PAGES DESIGNED BY LIN KING :: ASSOCIATE STREET EDITOR
Street speaks to five students about the inspiration behind their tattoos and the stories that followed Jennifer Shyue Senior Writer
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mily Burr ’15, Max Crawford ’15 and Josh Morrison ’17 have had theirs for a little over a year. Maxson Jarecki ’16 and Jane Pritchard ’15 have had theirs for three. Yet long before a tattoo artist ever set needle to skin, however, all five students had been carrying the words and images now etched on their bodies in the back of their minds. Burr has the words “However improbable” inked in black on her right rib. They are taken from the wellknown Sherlock Holmes maxim: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” In fact, even the design of the tattoo is taken from a photocopied page of “The Strand,” the magazine in which Conan Doyle originally published his Sherlock Holmes stories. “Basically, since seventh grade, I’ve been obsessed with Sherlock Holmes — the books and the good movies that are made,” Burr said. She later added that she thought about the tattoo for “a solid two years” before actually getting it. The intended meaning of the quotation is clearly a commentary on the nature of deduction, Burr said. For her, however, having the tattoo also serves as a reminder that “improbable” is not “impossible.” “People mistake improbable things for impossible things a lot, and it’s sort of a reminder to not do that,” she explained. Crawford has the letters “S O P A A D” and “U T I U A D” in all caps on
the inside of his left forearm. The letters run vertically down toward his wrist, six letters on either side of a dividing line, and they make up initialisms that stand for three phrases: “Shadows of perfection,” “Awake and dreaming,” and “Until time itself unravels and dissipates.” “It’s been in the making since freshman year of high school,” Crawford said. That is when he wrote the first phrase, “Shadows of perfection,” and began writing it on himself in pen. “They’re three phrases that embody certain ideals I want to live by,” he said. “The first one, in a word, is about history. It represents my struggle with depression and also my family’s struggle — so staying in touch with your past and your blood and knowing who you are.” He later added: “ ‘Shadows of perfection’ means that nothing is perfect.” “The second one, ‘Awake and dreaming,’ stands for hope — keep trying to be better, live better, do better, because you can be better,” Crawford said. “And the last phrase, ‘Until time itself unravels and dissipates,’ just means some things are eternal, including the previous two phrases.” Morrison has three tattoos. The first one he got was the phrase “Que Será, Será.” with the words, in Garamond, stacked three-high on his right rib. “Que será, será” is Spanish for “Whatever will be, will be” and was popularized as a saying by the 1956 song of the same name. The second one is the words “Live fast die young be wild and have fun” connected by jagged lines that mimic
the waveforms of an electrocardiogram. The sentence, a line from Lana Del Rey’s “Ride,” runs from just beneath Morrison’s right shoulder to the back of his upper arm. The third is a compass that sits on his back, right below his neck. “I always knew that I wanted a tattoo most definitely,” Morrison said. “My dad has 18 — so he’s going crazy with it — but from that I knew that I definitely wanted one.” “Que será, será” is something one of his best friends always said to him during his difficult senior year of high school, according to Morrison, and when he saw a tattoo of the phrase while browsing online one day, the idea of adding the ink to his own body clicked. Morrison sees the meaning of his second tattoo as this: “Life is only so long, and you’re only going to have so many chances and so many opportunities, and so the ‘Live fast, die young’ part is sort of like, take the chances you get because you may not get them again,” he said. “And then the ‘Be wild, have fun’ part, that’s just all about doing what you want to do and not being guided by forced standards or forced guidelines, just being your own individual person and whatever you want that to be. He noted that some people see “Die young” and are taken aback. For him, however, it is the overall message and not the literal directive that is important. Morrison’s most recent tattoo is a compass rose complete with letters representing the four cardinal direc-
tions. He got it with one of his best friends, who also got a compass tattooed on her upper back, though hers is of a different design. “It sort of has two different meanings for me,” Morrison explained. The first, which has to do with the fact that he and his friend have matching tattoos, is a reminder that “regardless of where we are or what’s going on in our lives or the people we’re surrounded with, we’ll always find our way back to each other, as cheesy as that may sound.” The second, more individual meaning, Morrison said, is “about having your own compass. It’s sort of similar to my second one — to let your own desires and passions and interests be what guide you and to let that be your compass and give you the direction you need.” Jarecki has a loon floating in water inked on the instep of his right foot. Every summer for the past 12 years, he has spent two months traveling via wood canvas canoe through northwest Ontario with Keewaydin Canoe Camp. He spent eight years as a camper, and next summer will be his fifth year leading a trip. The design is taken from the picture of a loon in the bottom-right corner of the map that campers use when they’re canoeing and portaging through the Canadian wilderness. “The loon is an animal that’s up there, and it’s kind of the soundtrack to these trips and to the way of life up there,” Jarecki said. “The kind of person I am when I’m existing in the natural world — that’s the most im-
portant thing for me.” Pritchard has a rose on her left wrist. It is no ordinary rose, however; tucked away in its folds is the number 65, and in one of the gaps between petals is the name of her sister, Nell. Pritchard’s sister has cystic fibrosis. Pritchard recounted how the phrase “65 Roses,” a nickname for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, was born after a young patient who with the disease misheard his doctor’s diagnosis as “65 roses.” The Foundation’s nickname formed the basis of a design drawn up by a local artist. “Back in high school, my sister started getting sick. We do a lot of fundraising, so one thing we did was we had this local artist design these necklaces,” Pritchard said. “The artist came up with this design that I now have on my wrist. It’s a rose with a 65 in the middle.” Some of the students intend to get more tattoos. Morrison is planning to get a matching tattoo with his sister on her 18th birthday. Crawford has four tattoo ideas on the “back burner” and said that he thinks he’ll end up getting at least two of them. Jarecki, on the other hand, firmly believes that his loon is the first and last tattoo he will ever get. Many of them cited ease in covering their tattoos with clothing as a factor in their decisions regarding the placement of their ink. “Definitely I thought a lot about location, in terms of both how it’d look as I got older and also just how easy
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COURTESY OF JANE PRITCHARD ‘15